1. Field of Invention
Personal identification identifiers, such as the social security number, finger print, or retina patterns, are of fixed nature; meaning, they stay on records and with a person for life. Therefore they need to be protected. However, in the information age, during course of time, and with constant use, such fixed data become exposed, and in essence will fall in the public domain; they loose their secrecy and become known to the public, and this feeds and encourages identity theft. This invention introduces a changeable substitution number or code to replace such fixed identity identifiers in accordance to who uses it. When a person's identity identifier changes, that person will no longer be track-able through his/her old identity-number (identifier) on record and given the time, the person's recorded information becomes obsolete and unusable for the most part. This invention lets a user organization of a person's identifier (SSN) to work with a proxy SSN of their own for their internal use while still be able to obtain credit and historical information on the person when needed. Therefore without having sacrificed functionality, a person's original identifier remains hidden from the eyes of the user-organization employees and customer-service-agents. Through this, the chances of identity theft will diminish with time.
The same method and procedure can be applied to safeguard and authenticate other identifiers that do not directly identify a person. Examples are EIN, Product Serial Numbers, Software Licenses, door access codes, and credit card numbers. These too, can be altered and tailored for each user through a dedicated user or merchant schema (Rule Number).
2. Status of Prior Art
On May 16, 2005 through U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/129,827 the inventor introduced the concept of Identity Matrix that allocates passwords to Social Security Numbers and other identifiers including Charge Card Numbers in a Matrix to be authenticated in a three-way relationship through “comparison”. On Aug. 23, 2005, through U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/710,693 the same inventor introduces “standard-made-up-social security number” or SMSSN that in essence are merchant specific proxy social security numbers as that being resented in this patent application.
On Aug. 19, 2006 through U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/506,476 this inventor takes the previous application further by introducing a third parameter in Identity Matrix and calls it a preset “rule”, or values of “rule-flag”. The rule flag takes the simple “comparison” method of his previous patent application one step further and expands it to any complex computerized based algorithm taking advantage of various possible relationships that can be established amongst the various elements existing in an Identity Matrix.
This application expands the same concepts of previous 3 patent applications and introduces encrypted instances of proxy forms of identifiers that are referred to as “Pxy” forms of various identifiers such; for example, a “PxySsn” represents an encrypted Social Security Number, and so on. These are generated on-the-fly by applying user-specific Rule Numbers along with other preloaded elements out of a person's Identity Matrix.
The Rule Numbers provide reference to an associated computer based algorithm that encrypts the original identifier.